The Agony Reviews

This game is, of course, hilariously bad, but also quite... sincere, I guess, is the word. You can tell that its creators cared deeply for its incoherent story, ridiculous worldbuilding, and poorly drawn characters. Not enough to give the game a thumbs up, but kind of charming, in a way.

Really liked the story, art & vibe of the other game they published, 'Sixtieth Kilometer', so I decided to check out The Agony. Seems like a lot of nuance in some of the writing was lost in translation, as the English translation for most lines just sounds...odd. Like some others have said, however, the game seems pretty sincere in that the devs actually cared about making it. I'm willing to bet that the writing/story reads way better in the original Russian :) I'll give the game a solid 7/10, & say at 99 cents, it's worth the price.

Visual novel, linear with very small, incomprehensible choices that affect which of 3 (4 with one hidden) endings you get. The story is very close to gibberish, and the art is amateur.

Normally considering my reviews and games that I enjoy I would definitely mark this as not recommended but I ended up enjoying it for more than 5 hours. Story was rather unique and not something that you can see in every game, it was about a civilization that got lost under the tunnels and us being end up with the same place as them and it had a backstory of that civilisation; newspapers, news, why they ended up like that, what happened in that day and age with detailed and well tought information which I have never seen in any game before so that made me as a player get into it more and more day by day. Control and graphicwise there ain't much to control so it didn't really bother me since it's a visual novel. Graphics were kinda old ngl but it still didn't really bother me since the story is something that made me blind to other aspects of the game. Overall it's something that you can play but yeah it's not comparable to other well made well sold games that are on the market, it's just unique one in the dark corners of Steam.

Alright. It doesn't really feel like my choices do much at all beyond getting the keys which is annoying. ending's pretty dumb. but whatever.. Wouldn't pay full pice. half or less.

Well, what to say. The only thing I really found appealing about this game was some of the music. However, the writing and the story, it's just bad. Half of the time you can't make sense of what the characters are trying to say. I think The Agony had a good amount of potential if it wasn't written so awkwardly. The game features strong sexual themes and violence. The choices do matter, leading you down multiple paths. Unfortunately, I couldn't get into it. The writing was just too bad. It translates from russian to english.

The Agony strikes me as a visual novel that had a good amount of potential. It has an interesting back story, some interesting characters and a good amount of choices but overall it doesn’t put it all together. The story doesn’t come to any real conclusion or even a cliffhanger, it just ends. No resolution given to many plot points. Many of the characters were well written but just go away with no explanation. There’s just too many loose ends to overlook. There are a good amount of choices as I mentioned but there are also a bunch that lead to a game ending death so those ones aren’t real choices. The text was pretty well done. You can tell it was written by someone to whom English wasn’t their native language so the sentence structure or wording was strange at times but you could tell what they meant and the spelling was great. I played The Agony on Linux. It opened on the wrong monitor and had to be moved over to my main monitor manually. This is a bug with the engine though not the game. The Agony used the Ren’Py engine. It used up 179MB of disk space. Alt-Tab worked. It never crashed on me once. I finished The Agony in 91 minutes. I paid $1.09 CAD for it and while it could be hard to argue value normally there are plenty of cheap or free visual novels that are better than this one. Overall I can't complain about the price but would recommend many other visual novels before I got to The Agony. My Score: 6/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.0.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22.1 | Kernel 5.1.4-1-MANJARO

There's a similarly-titled, yet much better-known horror game that came out recently which has, er...copped a bit of flak of late. As someone who played that game for only an hour or so, before opting to wait for future updates/improvements, I have to say: it still had a darn sight more going for it than [i]this[/i] utter pile of dreck. What is it with Russians and visual novels? Or even Russians with [i]horror games[/i], for that matter? Not one thing is noteworthy about this product: not the visuals, not the sounds, and sure as f*ck not the story or writing. I honestly can't find one kind thing to say about it, and can't even imagine that it would read well in Russian. A dumb story is a dumb story in [i]any[/i] language. Oh, and as a dubious bonus: p*ss-poor "Quick Time Events"...the second of which repeatedly crashed the game into a coding screen. Well done, KishMish Games. Verdict: 2/10 (okay, so [i]some[/i] of the visuals were alright. But only some). (PS If you enjoyed this review, feel free to check out my two Curator pages: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9284586-ReviewsJustfortheHELLofit/ http://store.steampowered.com/curator/10868048-Truly-Horrible-Horror-Games/?appid=398210 Cheers!)

This was agony to play. Horrible art style (using the term style very loosely), a twist end that would make M. Night Shyamalan cringe [spoiler] It was all a dream [/spoiler], awkward nudity scenes, horrible stock music, monsters that would make most Deviantart users shake their heads, painful QTE's that added nothing to the rexperience, unlikeable characters. The setting of the story could of been something that made for an interesting horror story but instead this feels like a first draft that the developers child wrote for a school class. It could be very possible that this has multiple endings and story branches but I couldn't care less to play through this game again to find out. Throwing stones into a pond is more of a interactive enjoyable experience.

A 3/10 effort. This is pretty much what not to do with the Ren'Py engine. The underlying concept of this game is sound, but it's the delivery. This is yet another Russian made Ren'Py game that insists on quick time events, which really don't suit the visual novel/adventure genre. Send that dross back to Tomb Raider where it belongs. It's a shame because even with the poor English translation, there's a decent story here, although the monster in the sewer trope has been done to death. On the plus side, it was cheap and it has trading cards.